What is this?

• This is a preparation for the Gameful Classroom Workshop to allow all participants to get to know the classrooms of each other prior to the event (to have more time for discussion)

• Please fill out this template and send it back so s.deterding@hans-bredow-institut.de by June 4

• Contact us for any questions, of course

How to use this document

• Each slide carries a title and a question

• Fill out the slide to answer the question• “Classroom” stands for any educational setup

• Create multiple slides per question or reformat the slides if your answer needs more space

• Feel free to ignore/delete the bullet points and put in diagrams/images/web links/whatever instead or in addition

• For each question, you can add further slides with supporting/documenting imagery before/after, of course

• If the structure (Curriculum – learning material – space – …) does not work for you, feel free to structure your slides any way you feel best allows you to portray your classroom. But try to cover the questions we provided in doing so, if possible

• Only consideration: Just by viewing your slides, another educator should be able to understand what you‘re doing

MathLandKate FanelliThe Gameful Classroom WorkshopGames Learning Society Educators Symposium 2012June 12, 2012, Madison, Wisconsin

My school, Beacon Day Treatment

Ridiculously bold claim

Reluctant learners enthusiastically agree without hesitation that

MathLand is the best and most enjoyable way to

learn and understand math.

In a nutshellFirst, state and national requirements for the courses are organized into “levels.” Each level represents a skill or closely related group of skills required for the course.

In a nutshellSecond, each level has 3 components: lesson/exercises (mandatory), practice problems (optional, as needed), and a mastery test (must be 100% correct and completed without human help).

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Rationale• I heard Marc Prensky say the two things kids like

about games are leveling up and avatars. I knew I could easily incorporate these into classroom design.

• I was struggling with continuity (attendance is a big problem), skill mastery (the tendency is toward just work production/completion), and motivation (not much motivation to just do endless piles of work with no end in sight). This design addressed these issues.

• I wanted to allow students to be self-paced, receive direct and individualized instruction, and put the focus on learning new skills – forward movement and improvement.

InspirationI am not a gamer, so I needed to do a lot of research on game design before building MathLand. Most of my inspiration came from authors. I read their ideas and I knew I could do this. So many great points to consider and incorporate…

Major Sources of Inspiration

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And, of course,

my studen

ts

• Learn about game design and how it appeals to players/learners.

• Incorporate into curriculum design (levels, avatars, status, etc.)

• Implement in classroom; collect attendance, mastery and work completion data. Add sticky note edits to binder as you go.

• Make corrections. Continue reading books to inform the process.

Building block: Curriculum• I printed and cut out the course required standards

and put them on notecards.

• I sorted them by importance (how foundational they are to other skills), and “doability” (based on abilities of my students – I want them to have early success).

• I group them into levels – sometimes just one is a level, sometimes more than one.

• I put them in a logical sequential order.Game design principles: levels, points, and Gee’s “semiotic domains” and “Regime of Competence”

Building block: Teaching

• I provide direct, personal instruction as needed to show students HOW to do a skill, WHY it is important and cool, and DEMONSTRATE the connections to the real world or other math.

• I circulate around the room to check in on student learning, check levels as they are completed, and offer help to students who need it.

• As to what principles I use in teaching, I would like to quote James Paul Gee from his book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning” on the next 2 slides.

Good instructors help as students go along so that overt information has meaning“Rather, as group members are discovering things through their own activity, the good science instructor comes up, assesses the progress they are making and the fruitfulness of the paths down which they are proceeding in their inquiry, and then gives overt information that is, at that point, usable. The instructor gives group members information that facilitates their further movement down a fruitful path they are already on, or sends them down a related but more fruitful path than the one on which they have hit, or gets them to think about an aspect of the phenomenon they are investigating that they have not yet considered but for which they are ready and ripe. And, indeed, after such embodied inquiry, there are even times when learners need and are ready for lectures. They are now able to give a good many of the words and phrases in the lecture situated and embodied meanings through their own mental simulations of former and future actions.”

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Learners don’t realize they are learning, or how difficult it is if the lesson/video game is well planned“This is what is magical about learning in good video games – and in good classrooms, too – learners are not always overtly aware of the fact that they are ‘learning,’ how much they are learning, or how difficult it is. Learners are embedded in a domain (a semiotic domain like a branch of science or a good video game) where, even when they are learning (and since the domain gets progressively harder, they are always learning), they are still in the domain, still a member of the team (affinity group), still actually playing the game, even if only as a ‘newbie’.”

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Building block: Learning material

Three components to each level (based more on instructional design principles than game design principles)

1.Lesson (with all necessary information and examples) and a few exercises to practice.

2.Practice (as needed and/or optional if students want practice beyond the exercises or if they try and fail the mastery test many times)

3.Mastery test (may use any resource that is not human and must be 100% correct and complete). Questions are in the same format as the exercises and practice problems.

Space and Materials

• Materials, including levels, are self-serve to avoid interruptions in the self-paced environment.

• My aim is to establish a positive learning environment that communicates a safe and productive atmosphere.

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Building block: ActivitiesActivities of learners may involve traditional lessons, project based experiences, graphing calculator applications, use of manipulatives, data collection, internet research, etc. They may be cooperative or individual.

Activities are based, again, on principles discussed in Gee’s book about “embedded meaning.” The extended quote from the book that guided me is on the next slide.

Abstract systems grew from embodied experiences. Students need to probe their world, form hypotheses, and reprobe.“Meaning is material, situated, and embodied if and when it is useful. Abstract systems originally got their meanings through such embodied experiences for those who really understand them. Abstraction rises gradually out of the ground of situated meaning and practice and returns there from time to time, or it is meaningless to most human beings. Because video games so nicely exemplify the nature of meaning as situated and embodied, they are also capable of capturing – and allowing players to practice – a process that is the hallmark of ‘reflective practice’ in areas like law, medicine, teaching, art, or any other area where there are expert practitioners. Playing a good video game like Deus Ex well requires the player to engage in the following four-step process: 1. The player must probe the virtual world (which involves looking around the current environment, clicking on something, or engaging in a certain action). 2. Based on reflection while probing and afterward, the player must form a hypothesis about what something (a text, object, artifact, event, or action) might mean in a usefully situated way. 3. The player reprobes the world with that hypothesis in mind, seeing what effect he or she gets. 4. The player treats this effect as feedback from the world and accepts or rethinks his or her original hypothesis.”

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Building block: Assessment

Again, I did not use any particular game design principles in designing the assessment. The assessments include:

•Checking each lesson/exercise component immediately upon completion and before moving the student to the mastery test

•A mastery test at the end of each level, checked immediately upon completion

•Observations and formative assessment as I circulate in the room

•Building and statewide standardized assessments

Effects

• Increased motivation – With a set number of levels, students have an end in site. If students earn 100 points before the end of a marking period they may stop working for the quarter or keep working to get a head start on the next quarter. These are equally motivating for students.

• Increased skill mastery – Students must now demonstrate mastery to earn their grade. Seems simple, but with this special population, learned helplessness and low self-esteem have caused many to believe grades are earned by hoping, maybe trying, and putting pencil to paper, but NOT by learning.

More effects• Increased accountability and continuity – Students

still come in and ask if they are missing any work. Nope. They are on the same level they were when they left. There is no make up work. Be here, learn the skills in order, and demonstrate mastery.

• Increased independent work and grade tracking – With the simple grading system and self-pacing, students can enter the room, get started, collect materials, and get help with little intervention from the teacher. Also, students record completed assignments on their own grade trackers so they always know how they are doing.

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Even more effectsDespite increased accountability and emphasis on skill building versus work completion, motivation is still up. Students enjoy leveling up, they race to get to 100 to earn free time or a head start, and they visit the avatar board to check on their progress.

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Still more effects

• Increased standardized test scores – I put this in here because it is an important metric for some people. For this population of students, I do not think standardized test scores are a valid way of measuring their abilities. Nonetheless, standardized test scores have gone up. I can’t make a real statistical claim that this is related to MathLand, but it’s nice that they went up.

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Last effects

• Better behavior – For this population of students, behavior is a major part of their program. MathLand has resulted in more time in class and productive work time. It also allows students to demonstrate independent work skills and to work cooperatively. For our students to do this without incident is a significant effect of MathLand.

• Students actually enjoy competing (in a pro-social, friendly, and appropriate manner) to see who can be first to finish a level, or to get to 100, or to complete a course.

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Challenges

• On busy days when lots of students need help it can be a little overwhelming and students have to wait.

• All the levels must be written and printed before the first day of class (ideally), so it’s a front loaded form of lesson planning for sure.

• Inputting grades from the MathLand grading scale into a web-based system that accepts only percentages means I have to finagle it just a little bit to get it to work.

• Getting students, parents and staff to understand the different format is time consuming, but once they understand it, they like it. They say it makes sense. Yes, it does.

Good Practices• Letting students “level up” has worked incredibly well.

• Building in status like colored sticker dots on handmade avatars (for mastered levels and consistent attendance) and putting up certificates in the hallway (based on upgrading the color of your sticker dots) is also surprisingly motivating for students, especially considering they are pretty much free and pretend.

• Having an end in sight motivates students to keep working. In the old system, finishing early meant I had to come up with something else to fill the time. I can see why reluctant learners wouldn’t work hard enough to buy themselves extra work.

• The mastery test works incredibly well to ensure new skill attainment. I tell the students that the exercises and practice are for learning, but the mastery test is to show you have learned it and that’s what they earn points for. It makes sense and it works.

As students earn status by mastering levels and attending class, they also earn

certificates in the Hall of Fame. This is cumulative, tangible evidence of their

achievement.

This concludes your tour of MathLand. Thank you for visiting.